men and women, and children--she wanted to see them. She
wanted to touch them. She wanted to talk with them. It was
as though a lover of the drama, eager to see his favorite
actress in her greatest part, were to find himself viewing
her in a badly constructed film play.

So Fanny Brandeis took to prowling. There are people who
have a penchant for cities--more than that, a talent for
them, a gift of sensing them, of feeling their rhythm and
pulse-beats, as others have a highly developed music sense,
or color reaction. It is a thing that cannot be acquired.
In Fanny Brandeis there was this abnormal response to the
color and tone of any city. And Chicago was a huge,
polyglot orchestra, made up of players in every possible
sort of bizarre costume, performing on every known
instrument, leaderless, terrifyingly discordant, yet with an
occasional strain, exquisite and poignant, to be heard
through the clamor and din.

A walk along State street (the wrong side) or Michigan
avenue at five, or through one of the city's foreign
quarters, or along the lake front at dusk, stimulated her
like strong wine. She was drunk with it. And all the time
she would say to herself, little blind fool that she was:

"Don't let it get you. Look at it, but don't think about
it. Don't let the human end of it touch you. There's
nothing in it."

And meanwhile she was feasting on those faces in the crowds.